OK, what are those stars up in the sky, fiery balls of matter or the tapestry of God?

The answer, of course, is — yes! (Laughter)

Well, one thing I’m trying to do at Le Moyne is getting students to look at the sky with more than one set of eyes. By accident, I was preparing a talk, and I had a photograph of the Pleiades and the “Starry Night” image from Van Gogh, and I realized the stars are almost in the same position. When you superimpose the two, you realize there is more than one way of looking at the stars. It’s like looking at a picture through different colored filters.

Think there’s life out there?

You know, I do, but that’s just a hunch. I’ve got no data, no more than anybody else does. I think the science fiction fan in me kind of hopes there is.

You said, religion needs science to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality. ..

Well, first of all, I must confess that it wasn’t me who said that, I was quoting Pope John Paul. So it comes from a better authority than me. And it does work. There is a lot of superstition in the world, and there is a lot of need to pull back and say, ‘Wait a minute, how much of this is just because it makes me feel good, and how much of this is based on reality, because it’s not obvious, necessarily, that it’s one or the other. Things that we refer to as old wives tales often turn out to show the old wives knew what they were talking about. But we always have to have a bit of skepticism.

To quote another authority — just about the opposite from John Paul II, a religion writer named Ann Lamott, whom I love when I’m not mad at her from reading her stuff — she said, the opposite of faith is not doubt. The opposite of faith is certainty. We have to have, I think, more than one leg to stand on when we’re looking at the universe. We have to have that sense that we know that we don’t know it all, whether we’re talking about God or we’re talking about stars.

Are we getting to that point, or are we too proud of what we think we know?

Oh, it’s the human adventure. We’re always just getting there. And then, it’s like teaching freshman. As soon as you get them educated, they go out and become sophomores, and you have to do it all over again. It’s true of the human race, and it’s true of us as individuals. We spend our lives learning the same lessons over and over again.

Does science need religion as much as religion needs science?

Oh, absolutely. Science needs religion to justify its very existence. There are certain assumptions you have to make about the universe before you can do science. You have to assume that the universe actually exists, and we’re not just imagining it out of our heads. And that’s a philosophical assumption. There are philosophies that don’t believe that. You have to believe that the universe makes sense before you can even start looking for the rules of the universe. You have to assume the universe has rules. And there are philosophies and religions that don’t believe that.

If you think that everything happens because it’s "the will of the gods," then you’re not going to look for any scientific laws. If you think lightning occurs because it’s the arbitrary whim of the god of lightning, you’ll never sit down and try to work out the laws of electrodynamics. And more than that — and this is the hardest part — you have to believe that the physical universe is so good, so wonderful, that it’s worth spending your life studying it. And there are religions out there that think the universe is evil, that it’s massive corruption, and we have to get away from the physical universe. That’s not Christianity. Christianity is the religion that said, God so loved this universe that he sent his son to become part of it.

Are there areas where you find the ways of science conflict with the doctrines of the church?

People don’t really understand what science is, and they don’t really understand what the doctrines of the church are. The way they’re put together, they can’t possibly conflict, because they’re not really talking about the same things. In one sense, we’re talking about the natural world, of which we’ve got theories that we understand very well, but that only approximate the reality of what the physical universe has for us. And in religion, we’ve got truths that we know are true, but we don’t understand them. So in that sense, it really is apples and oranges.

Apples are a bad image, if we’re talking about Genesis.

The word "apple" actually never appears in Genesis, I’ll have you know.

Really? I stand corrected.

More to that — and thanks to Galileo, it’s especially easy, being a Catholic, because the church so screwed up in the Galileo case, that it’s been careful to never make that mistake again.

I wasn’t going to mention Galileo, but since you raised it. . .

It’s something that, as an astronomer, in the year of Galileo, it’s important to raise. Galileo was a good Italian, a good Catholic, after that absurd trial, and he’s a hero.

But he wasn’t viewed a hero back then, was he?

Actually, he was. The church really supported him for most of his life. Then for a few years he was in trouble, and then he was supported again. It’s sort of bizarre. Nobody totally understands what was going on back then. His first house arrest was spent at the house of the Archbishop of Sienna, as a personal honored guest. It’s bizarre.

What about the folks who believe in the book of Genesis as a literal account of the beginnings of the world? How does that square with what you believe as an astronomer?

Well, first of all, that’s an incredibly modern interpretation. That’s not at all traditional Christianity. St. Augusta spoke against that back in the year 400 in a book called, "On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis." So that’s not at all traditional Christian ideas. And they’re certainly not Catholic ideas.

The trouble is, people who do that tend to be engineers who view everything in the world in a literal sense. I ran into an astronaut once who was a Creationist. He believed in the days of Creation. I’m thinking, the book of Genesis also says the world is flat and has a dome with water above and below the earth — so how come the space shuttle doesn’t get wet? And then I realized that his job as a test pilot was to literally follow the instructions he was given. This made him a great test pilot. But don’t ask him to go to the Museum of Modern Art.

People who have that point of view seem to be afraid to understand that there are important truths that can only be expressed in terms of poetry. And God is one of those important truths. It’s a modern feeling. You don’t really find that until the modern times.

You went to South Pole to find meteorites.

Actually, I never quite made it to the pole. I was about latitude 70 south in the East Antarctic Plateau. It made Syracuse look comfortable.

Some people say that’ll be Judgement Day, when the big asteroid hits.

Ah, yes! Some say the world will end by fire, and some say in ice.

Robert Frost?

Robert Frost.

Well, are we in danger of an asteroid hitting?

It certainly could happen. Certainly, things like that have happened. It’s inevitable that at some point, in some future day, something big is going to hit us. It might be tomorrow, and it might be a million years from now. On the one hand, I think it’s well worth our while, for a lot of reasons — not just the danger of being hit by something — for us to have a good inventory of what’s out there and what’s likely to hit us.

On the other hand, if you’re really worrying about dying, my advice is — wear your seatbelt and don’t smoke.

Well, if we’re trying to stick around, what should we put our faith in, astronomy or God?

Well, as the old President said, "Trust, but verify." There’s a famous line of St. Ignatius that sometimes gets flipped. It’s, "Pray as if everything depends on God, and work as if everything depends on you." Sometimes it’s said, "Pray as if everything depends on you, and work as if everything depends on God." Look, we are creatures put on this earth by God not to sit around, do nothing and expect Him to do everything. What’s more, that’s no fun. This is a participatory game, not a spectator sport. We get to be with God by working in this universe that He’s created, seeing things that need doing, and doing them. To me, that’s an act of prayer, as much as — and no less than — getting down on your knees.

When you brought out that Van Gogh painting and the photograph of the stars, what was the reaction?

I think they made a bigger impact than all my words. It was a talk on the second day I got here, for a subject called "Evolution and Resurrection." That’s the one image everybody remembers. I think, almost by accident, it said what I was trying to say: That each of these ways of looking at the universe is important, and they beautifully complement each other.

Wouldn’t a scientist say, it’s mere coincidence; what’s the big deal?

It’s not the coincidence I’m emphasizing. In fact, somebody has gone and figured out what star field he had in mind — and I don’t think it was the Pleiades. That’s not the point. Let me tell you a story, going back to my Lafayette (College) days. Whenever you hear a scientist or mathematician describing what they do, the words they tend to use are like, "This is an elegant solution." When you hear an artist — I saw this among students in the fine arts program— describing the way they put a painting together, they talk about, "the function of this over here is to balance the function of that over there."

We are not split into a world of Spocks and Kirks. In each of us, the scientist does creative work out of the artistic side. The artist does detailed and technical work to bring out their creativity. That’s why it’s so human. That’s why you can’t have a machine do your science for you, or a machine painting your pictures.